Time & Perspective Quote by Candace Bushnell

Celebrity is a genre of fiction that insists on being filed as fact, and Bushnell skewers it with a shrug and a scalpel. The line lands because it treats the gossip column as both omniscient narrator and unreliable source: the kind of voice that can place you at a party you never attended and still sound authoritative doing it. Her “sometimes read” is doing quiet work, implying this isn’t an outlier but a recurring ritual of misrecognition.

The Doppelganger isn’t just a cute metaphor for mistaken sightings; it’s a way to name the split between a public-facing character and a private person. Bushnell, as the writer whose cultural shadow looms large over the Sex and the City era, understands how the marketplace doesn’t merely report a life - it drafts one. Gossip columns don’t need your presence; they need your plausibility. If you’re “Candace Bushnell,” you’re a movable prop in other people’s social narratives, deployed to make a scene feel important.

There’s also a writerly self-awareness here: she’s describing the mechanics of storytelling while being trapped inside someone else’s bad draft. The humor is defensive, but it’s not light. It points to a modern anxiety: not being misquoted, but being multiply authored. The real insult isn’t that the column got it wrong. It’s that it can get it wrong repeatedly and still shape what readers believe happened.